


Momentum Deferred

by Kedreeva



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Angel and Demon True Forms (Good Omens), Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Aziraphale being very dramatically sad, Beelzebub actually being pretty okay, Crowley Falls, Declarations Of Love, Demon Crowley (Good Omens), Demon True Forms, Feral Crowley (Good Omens), Gabriel Being an Asshole (Good Omens), Happy Ending, Healing, Hurt Crowley (Good Omens), Hurt/Comfort, Injury, M/M, Memory Loss, Minor Violence, Non-Consensual Touching, Other, Pain, Suicidal Thoughts, Temporary Amnesia, The Fall (Good Omens), Wing damage, but like again, but more like an invasion of autonamy, except the first time, in an attempt to perform healing, on a creature that is aware but can't consent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-27
Updated: 2020-11-27
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:48:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27746245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kedreeva/pseuds/Kedreeva
Summary: What if Crowley really meant it when he said he only sauntered vaguely downward? What if someone besides Aziraphale finds out he didn't really fall? What if they decide to do something about it?
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 98
Kudos: 523





	Momentum Deferred

**Author's Note:**

> Please make sure you've read the warnings, and tread carefully. I tried to include tags for all of the things that might be a common problem, but if I missed something obvious please let me know. RE: the non-consensual touching, it is in a non-sexual situation, where Aziraphale is attempting to help Crowley, who is not currently able to agree to being helped. Also, I do promise this will have a happy ending!

_**“Momentum can be deferred,** _

_**but it must always be paid back in full.”** _

\- William Bell, _Fringe_

It happened on a Tuesday.

Aziraphale had been having a perfectly ordinary Tuesday. He had closed the shop at the usual time, or perhaps a few minutes early, and made himself a cup of tea and wiggled himself into comfort upon his favorite armchair so he could read a few chapters before Crowley's arrival for dinner. They had planned to try out a new restaurant outside of town, one a customer had recommended weeks ago, and Aziraphale had been looking forward to it since Crowley agreed to drive.

However, he was only halfway through the first chapter when cold dread washed through him, fear prickling in its wake, and all sense of Crowley's existence went dead the exact same way it would do if he were doused in holy water.

Or, he struggled to remind himself as he opened his wings, already on his feet, the exact way it would do if one of their sides had snatched him off of this plane of existence and placed demonic binding magic upon him.

Barely a second later, he slammed open the doors to Gabriel's office, not bothering with the nicety of translocation spells or knocking. It was not as if he'd been obeying many other rules since his assignment to Earth, and even fewer since the world hadn't ended. In fact, he hadn't seen hide nor hair of an angel or demon since they'd tried to destroy him with holy water, thinking he was Crowley. The least of his sins would be flying directly into Gabriel's office without permission.

"Where is he?" he demanded, wings braced and the essence of a sword tingling at his fingertips, yet undrawn. He would pull a weapon upon Gabriel if he had to. He would tear Heaven apart at the seams if he had to; it was overdue, with how abysmally it was being run without Her to oversee it.

Gabriel hadn't stood when Aziraphale entered, and he didn't stand now. A slow smile spread over his lips as he sat back in his plush chair. "Oh, good," he said, voice slick. "It did go through. I'm afraid you won't find your little pet here, Aziraphale. He's Fallen now."

Aziraphale's brow wrinkled and he gave serious consideration to drawing the sword into existence. "He already fell," Aziraphale said cautiously. He was fairly certain Crowley had not _risen_ in order to Fall again.

Aziraphale had met demons with smiles less oily than the one Gabriel gave him as he tipped his head one way, and then another, expression scrunching a little. "Well, he _fell,_ but he didn't really... _Fall,_ you know? More like... slithered down."

 _Sauntered vaguely downward,_ echoed Crowley's voice from so many years ago.

_"Where is he?"_ Aziraphale asked again. He would not ask a third time.

Rather than answer aloud, Gabriel raised a hand, and pointed downward. Aziraphale's stomach sank. So Hell had gotten him, then, not Heaven. He didn't know his way around there. He'd only ever been down there the once, and all the halls they had marched him down looked the same.

It didn't matter. He didn't have to know where to go. He just had to turn up, and make someone show him.

With that thought in mind, he flapped his wings again, and slipped between existences, heading for the basement.

* * *

_It pulls itself out of the boiling sulfur, all of its wings dripping and burning away, no flesh left to which feathers might cling. It spreads the remnants of its bones, the celestial energy of them transparent but intact, and lays them out over the shore of the bubbling pool. It feels nothing but aching, bleeding pain, and unending hunger._

_It has Fallen, though it does not remember from where._

_It is broken, though it does not remember being whole._

_It is **not** alone._

_It mindlessly snaps its jaws as one of the seething things down here with it gets too close, and heaves itself up, rearing high to watch the things scatter away. Fear leaves a sweet tang in the air, and it drops down to slither after the trail, starving to fill a void with anything it can fit into its maw._

_It will feast, or be feasted upon, and it does not much care which, so long as the pain ends._

* * *

Hell was not quite the same as Aziraphale remembered it. The last time he had been here all of the demons, or at least all of the ones that were able to, had been crammed into the viewing space where they had hoped to see Crowley destroyed forever. Aziraphale should have wiped them out then. He should have taken the holy water Michael had so generously poured out, and bathed the whole of Hell in it. Maybe whatever had happened to Crowley now wouldn't have happened at all, if he had. Maybe the halls would have been empty when he arrived, and he could have sneaked around until he found Crowley without a fuss.

As it was, the halls were packed full of demons, and the moment his feet hit the floor, he lashed out and snatched up the nearest of them by the collar, letting his true form bleed out of his corporation, expanding with holy light that the demons all shied away from. They might have been willing to take him in his human form, but a full-blown cherub was a bit of a different story.

_"Where is he?"_ he shouted with all of his mouths save one, both aloud and with his Voice, and whatever demons had thought they might be brave enough to stay, now scattered out of sight at the sense of it. The one held aloft in his lion's maw cringed and curled in upon herself like a kitten being carried by her mother.

"I don't know!" she squealed miserably. "I don't know anything!"

"Put her down," came a voice from behind him.

Aziraphale whirled, ready for a fight, only to find the diminutive form of one of the seven princes of Hell standing before him. The one that had tried to have Crowley executed. _"Beelzebub,"_ he hissed, mantling and pulling a sword from the ether. _"I've come for what's mine."_

"I figured you would," ze said. "Come on then. And spit that out, you know where it'szz been."

Aziraphale dropped the lesser demon, his lion's visage lagging behind him to watch her scurry off as the rest of him began to follow Beelzebub. It thinned and warped and collected itself in his wake. Beelzebub did not so much as look back once, leading him down sodden halls empty of demons that had sensed Aziraphale coming. Ze stepped into an elevator and Aziraphale poured his true form in after, only slightly uncomfortable as the doors grated worryingly shut and the contraption shuddered into motion.

"I want you to know," Beelzebub said as soon as the doors had closed, "that I left him alone. I said I would, and I did. Hell left him alone."

_"If that was true, we wouldn't be here,"_ Aziraphale said curtly. He didn't want to talk. He wanted Crowley back, immediately.

Beelzebub stood silently for a long moment, jaw tight as the elevator jerked and heaved and ground its way slowly downward. Finally ze made a frustrated noise. "He'zz here becauzzze _your lot_ put him here. To punish you."

_"That seems like the long way around,"_ Aziraphale said.

"Bureaucraszzy," Beelzebub said. "It wazz built for the long way around. Juszzt don't _dizzzcorporate_ me when you find out what that tart upstairszz hazz done to your boyfriend."

Nerves not calmed at all, Aziraphale held himself together until the elevator creaked into place. The doors opened and the ground was a foot higher than the bottom of it, which was annoying but not insurmountable, and Aziraphale followed Beelzebub over the lip. They traversed a short tunnel and came out into what looked like a corporate box seat at a sports arena.

_"Where are we?"_ Aziraphale asked, peering around with all of his many eyes. The far wall was lined with glass that danced with the patterns of fire beyond.

"The loweszzt ring," Beelzebub said, stepping out of the way. "The uh... landing pad. Where demonzz go when they firszzt Fall."

 _Sauntered vaguely downward,_ Crowley had said. Aziraphale felt like he'd been dipped in a vat of ice. He wanted to wake up from this, and go to dinner, and forget it.

"He already fell," Aziraphale protested weakly, his true form sinking away as he began to walk unsteadily across the room to the glass.

"Not egzzzactly," Beelzebub said.

Aziraphale reached the windows and peered down through them. Below, he could see vast pools of boiling sulfur casting their blue-white light in dancing patterns over the shifting true-forms of the demons that stalked their edges. Eyes of all sorts blinked from shadows that belonged to one demon or the next, creatures distinguishable from one another only by the glow of their cores. The ichor that clung to their bodies lit up as if under ultraviolet light, lending even more confusion to the tangle of snapping, lashing, writhing shapes. Aziraphale covered his mouth with both hands when he saw the light reflect off the bare, clean bone of a stripped wing before it vanished into the coil once more.

He cast out, feeling for Crowley, but there was nothing. No echo back like there would have been on Earth, no curl of warm existence waiting. Nothing at all familiar to be found in this mess.

"He's down there?" he asked, voice cracking.

"Somewhere," Beelzebub said. Ze joined Aziraphale at the window, looking down, zir hands clasped behind zir back.

Aziraphale attempted to discreetly wipe at his eye, but knew very well he wasn't fooling a prince of Hell. "Why would they do this to him twice?" he asked, almost rhetorically. He knew why.

"They didn't," Beelzebub said, and ze sounded almost... sad. "Technically, at leazzt. _She_ cazzt uzz all out, but... She still loved uzz. Can't have that. Dickwingzzz McArchangel up there filed paperwork to have our Connection severed and Her Love removed. Guess he mizzzfiled Crowley'szz paperwork the first time."

Aziraphale watched one of the demons whirl, jaws snapping closed on the demon nearest to it. "A clerical error," he breathed out. He swallowed against the lump in his throat, but it didn't move. "A fucking _clerical error?"_

"He wanted to hurt you," Beelzebub said. Ze didn't have to say names; Aziraphale knew it was Gabriel's doing.

"Then why didn't he..." Aziraphale began, but he knew that answer, too. There was nothing Gabriel could have done to Aziraphale that would hurt him as badly as it would if he did it to Crowley instead. This was his fault, for falling in love with a demon, for going against Heaven's wishes. For defying Gabriel, in particular. "Fine," he said instead. "I'm going to find him, and I'm going to take him with me, and if you try to stop me, I swear-"

"I won't," Beelzebub said, bringing lazy hands up to show they were empty. "I want nothing to do with either of you. I've got enough problemzz already."

"Well... good," Aziraphale said, fury fizzling as it found no purchase. "How do I get down there?"

Beelzebub nodded toward a little door to Aziraphale's right, but when Aziraphale took a step toward, it, Beelzebub said: "You should know, angel, he won't remember you. He won't remember anything. No one doeszz, after the Fall. You can take him home and calm him down and dreszz him up, but he'zz a demon now."

"He was a demon before." Aziraphale tried to ignore the cold fear settling into his bones at Beelzebub's implication. Crowley was a demon. Crowley had _always been_ a demon, as long as Aziraphale had known him. Aziraphale had seen him use infernal magic.

"He wazz an angel that fell," Beelzebub said. "A demon, a real one, izz a different creature. There'zz no coming back from that. It'zz not like dizzcorporation. There'zz nothing left of who he wazz."

“Why are you telling me this?” Aziraphale demanded, voice trembling. His heart beat so quickly his head felt light. This _must_ be a trick. A barb, a knife, salt in an open wound. Surely Beelzebub just wanted Aziraphale to stop trying and go home empty handed.

Beelzebub shrugged, something like a brush off, and looked away. "Juszzt take him and go. And don't zzay I didn't warn you."

Aziraphale looked zir over, much less certain it had been a trick, and then opened his wings and headed for the exit. The stone door had no give at first, and then it grated open, and fell off of one hinge, sticking in place. Heat from below blasted in, and Aziraphale dived out into it without hesitation. The longer he waited, the longer Crowley had to survive whatever was going on in the pit below.

Still, it took Aziraphale a distressingly long time to find the snake-eyed demon with crumpled black wings, and too many mouths, and a core the color of molten lava. It squirmed and swelled and collapsed upon itself like a roiling mass of snakes, eldritch and damaged and furious. He had hoped, until the very second he landed, that Beelzebub had been wrong and Crowley would recognize him, but he had to dance away backward to avoid the gnashing maw of a wolverine head and the snap of a viper's jaw as Crowley attempted to attack him.

"It's me!" Aziraphale said, over the wailing of damned souls around them. This place was deafening, nothing at all like the chill, open emptiness of Heaven. No wonder demons were so different.

He watched as one of Crowley's long crocodile jaws split into dozens more and slammed shut on a fleeing soul. It writhed in the grasp of his teeth, but there was no death here. There was only Crowley's endlessy snapping jaws, the void of his throat, the hellfire burning upon the hardened shell of his core. Aziraphale watched helplessly as the soul was torn apart, and tried to tell himself that whoever it had once been, they had done something to deserve to be here. Souls could not truly be destroyed here; that would end their torment.

"Crowley!" Aziraphale tried again, and received a surge of slimy magic that forced him to bring up his own to avoid being hit. The two forces collided before him, and he felt the slide of demonic magic over his as it dripped to the stone below.

He swallowed. Crowley had never attacked him. _Would_ never attack him.

"That's enough," he said firmly. "You've forgotten yourself, and that's not your fault, but I am leaving, and whether or not you like it, you're coming with me."

With that, he pulled the shape of a celestial sword from the ether, forged by magic, and allowed his true form to bleed out of his corporation again. The demon before him shied away from the burning light, but Aziraphale leapt nimbly into the air and began to draw patterns of light with the tip of his sword. Sigils formed quickly, spread and duplicating themselves, seeking the demon they had been crafted to bind. Crowley reared up to fight, and the magic struck first, wrapping over and around his energy, sealing it in place, trapping his essence until there was no escape left.

Aziraphale could feel every press of Crowley's will against his own, but a freshly-Fallen demon was a raw thing, wild and so, so much weaker than even the lowest of angels. Aziraphale may have been demoted to a principality by rank, but he was still a cherub by nature. Crowley really was no match for him.

Had he been a proper angel, he would have snuffed out Crowley's life, right here, without much of a thought.

As it was, he yanked upon the strings of reality, and found himself standing in the middle of Crowley's flat, where no one would disturb them. Gently, he allowed the bundle of demonic rage to settle upon the clean, white floor. He couldn't keep Crowley at the bookshop, and couldn't let him out into the world, so this would have to do as a holding cell.

He sighed, scrubbed a little too hard at his face, and then set about laying the binding sigils that would keep Crowley a prisoner here until Aziraphale figured out how to fix this.

* * *

_He shifts, essence coiling and uncoiling in great loops that surround the bitter core of him. There was darkness, before, and fire, and pain. Howling. Endless howling and fear and anger. Hunger._

_The darkness has gone, replaced by insufferable light._

_It sits, out of reach of his wide-stretched maws._

_Every molecule of him wishes to devour it whole, or tear it to shreds, extinguish it._

_Still it sits, just out of reach._

_He throws himself at it again, but there is pain between them, twisted into shapes that will not allow him to pass. He seethes and scrabbles ineffectually at them, the light burning at his claws and his snouts and his broken, charred wings._

_He drops bonelessly to the floor of his cage._

_He will devour the light. He will._

_It sits, watching. Waiting._

_Slowly he stretches out, form shifting but not changing. He has been bound. He cannot stretch celestially and this form, this gross matter he has been spliced into does not move the same. It burns and aches and he cannot escape it._

_He howls, writhing around and around himself._

_He wants out._

_He wants out of this body. Out of this place._

_The barrier of pain shimmers under his battered claws,_

_and the light sits,_

_and it watches._

* * *

Aziraphale watched as Crowley once more threw himself at the barrier sigils, the ones he had drawn to contain him here in the flat. It had been a very long time since he'd had to fight any demons, at least any in their raw form. He had nearly forgotten how brutal they were in the beginning. How feral.

But he supposed that was what happened when someone took everything that a creature was, and destroyed it. An angel was a being of love and of light. What was an angel, then, if its love was removed and it was cast into darkness? What does one fill a void with, when it is endless?

He had left Crowley here overnight the first night, hoping that the small, quiet space would relax him. There were no other demons here, nothing that could attack him, nothing that would try to end him. However, the silence only seemed to enrage him further, or maybe it was Aziraphale's presence, if the way he twisted and shrieked and raked himself along the barrier was any indication. Even through the muffle of magic he could feel the hatred boiling over from the demon before him.

It felt nothing at all like Crowley.

"I don't know how to help you," Aziraphale said quietly, watching Crowley slink around the edges of the room, testing the walls for weaknesses. "I don't even know if there's any _you_ left in there."

Crowley ignored him.

Aziraphale had spent the entire night combing the world wide web for information about treating memory loss, but all of it was remarkably human. It was built for the repair of human minds, with neurons and synapses and tangible bits that could heal. An angel – or a demon, in the end – was made mostly of energy and particles of light and the idea of themselves. Their memories didn't work like human memories. They didn't _remember_ things because there was nothing to remember; they were, at all times, everything they had ever been, all at once.

It was difficult to think that the only thing which stood between Aziraphale and becoming such an awful, twisted thing as what stalked around before him was the love of a single being.

_When is a monster not a monster?_

He remembered a poem which posed the question. He remembered the answer, too.

"I love you," he said aloud. Though he knew it was far too little, he still hoped it was not too late. "I should have told you sooner. I should have done a lot of things sooner. Perhaps we wouldn't be here now, if I had. You would have still had love."

The creature before him did not respond to the words, or even to his voice. It gnashed its teeth and tried to splinter claws into the wood of a doorframe and endlessly coiled around and around itself in its rage. It was hard to reconcile the sight with the memory of Crowley's soft, warm smile. Crowley had always been full of sharp angles, but not like this.

"Beelzebub told me there was nothing left of you," he murmured, watching Crowley's form melt and shift. Here, a glimpse of a red belly. There, a yellow, slitted eye. "But I don't believe it. Surely it-" He stopped, throat closing up.

Surely it could not be so easy to destroy what they had built.

The thought left a little curl of anger within him, as well, an echo of the fury emanating from Crowley.

It should not have been so easy. It should not have happened _at all._ If Beelzebub was to be believed, She had already given her punishment to the Fallen. She had cast them out. Gabriel had done this to Crowley, and Aziraphale was _well_ aware that Gabriel's will was not always _Her_ will. He should never have been able to take something so precious from Crowley. From Aziraphale.

Before him, Crowley turned, dozens of eyes winking in and out of existence as he looked.

Aziraphale looked right back, wondering if Crowley could feel his anger. "If you cannot remember my love, do you at least recognize this? Do you remember how my anger felt to you?"

The demon lurched and shambled closer, coils squirming, eyes steady upon him. Even as Aziraphale's heart broke, it gave him hope. Beelzebub had said there was nothing left of who an angel was before, but if Crowley remembered this, what _else_ was left?

"That's it," Aziraphale said, almost coaxing. "I can feel your anger just as surely as you must feel mine, even through these wards. Did you save any of it? Did Gabriel leave it behind, thinking it insignificant? If he did he's a fool. Whatever he's left of you, I'll find it."

Crowley's being reared up like a striking snake, and Aziraphale stepped forward, through the warding sigils. He was too close to be struck, now, and so he did the striking, wings out and jaws snapping as he tangled himself up in Crowley's true form. Distantly he could hear the screaming as Crowley's coils looped around him like a snake squeezing prey, but he had already turned his senses ethereal. He had already shoved most of himself into the spaces between Crowley's existence, seeking.

The hatred nearly overwhelmed Aziraphale, stamped into every part of the demon around him. He sifted through it, digging through the pain of his ruined form, through the fear, through the betrayal that could not be resolved because it had been founded on things Crowley no longer remembered. Aziraphale dug, all the way to the cold, leaden core of him, and found nothing which spoke of the being he had once known.

Even the anger was fresh. Fury at being held captive. At being hurt by the wards. Aziraphale could see himself through Crowley's senses, and knew only that his Light had dimmed when he was angry.

He pressed himself against Crowley's core, hoping for some indication that it, at least, held some glimmer of the past, but it lay still and silent beneath his touch. He felt no echo of Crowley, no echo of himself.

There really was nothing left.

He withdrew his core, still holding tight with the rest of his form until the very last second. In one smooth motion, he released the demon and stepped backward through the wards. The demon threw itself against the wards, sending them cracking with Light, and it shrieked and clawed until it could no longer stand the pain before it dropped to the floor, heaving.

Aziraphale stood there, watching, empty.

Love had been ripped from the thing before him, and Crowley with it, and Aziraphale may as well have gone too. Heaven had destroyed them both at once.

* * *

_The angel watches him._

_It comes and goes, at times of its own pleasing. Sometimes it stays only minutes, sometimes it stays for days. It touches the wards, looking for damage, though there is none. Yet._

_It is waiting for something, he thinks. It is waiting for him to do something, and so he does nothing. He waits, too. He can wait until the day the binding spells falter, and he can escape. He waits for the day the angel lets its guard down, and he can destroy it._

_It has bested him twice, now. Both times it had held him still, violating his entire being, laying its burning touch upon his core._

_It is looking for something, but it will not find it._

_He will be destroyed before he lets this angel have anything it wants._

_This does not deter it. Instead, it seems only more determined. It makes noises – mortal noises – at him, but he does not understand them. It shows him flat squares of matter with spectrums of light upon them. It brings collections of these flat squares, and sits beside the barrier, and makes noises for hours. It sings. It leaks flowing matter from its mortal eyes._

_Today it holds nothing in its hands, and he braces himself for another violation, tightening his core until it becomes impenetrable before destruction. He will fight, again. He will lose, but he will fight, until it leaves him to decay in this thrice-damned cage._

_It steps through, and he strikes, but it is made for war and it grabs him by the core before he can think to turn. It **burns.** It burns and burns and he howls, writhing, trying to get a grasp upon it to push it away, but it holds fast. In two talons it seizes one of his broken wings, and he thinks this might be it. The angel has come to rend him to pieces, to finally destroy him like it should have done when they met. At the first touch of its Light, it hurts so badly he goes slack._

_Eternity comes and goes in an instant, and then he is cast to the floor like a dead thing, his wing a molten bolt of pain but still attached to him. Every part of him shivers, trembling in pain, and it is a long time before he begins to gather himself._

_His wing lifts when he flexes it, and he falls still again._

_It is not whole, but it is no longer a tattered, broken, charred thing. The bones have knit into their proper places, and the flesh has begun to return._

_His eyes turn to the angel, standing on the other side of the barrier._

_It has healed him, or at least this one part of him._

_He does not understand._

_It should have killed him, but instead it has made him a little more whole._

_He stares at it, confused, and it stares back as if it were the wounded one._

_And then it is gone, and Crowley is alone again._

* * *

It didn’t matter, Aziraphale had decided, if Crowley remembered him or not. He remembered Crowley, and he owed him whatever help he could give. If not for the millennia between them, then because he might not be in this situation if Gabriel had not been out to hurt Aziraphale. So it didn’t matter if he didn’t remember Aziraphale, or himself, or what they did or did not have; Aziraphale was going to help him.

He started with the least of what he could do, and began to repair Crowley’s energy signature as best as he could with Crowley resisting tooth and nail every time. Aziraphale’s magic had never burned Crowley before, but it did now, with every application. The only consolation Aziraphale had was that Crowley could heal from the burns. He couldn’t heal the mangled wings, or the incoherence of his form, or the raw wounds to his essence Gabriel had left.

So Aziraphale seared him until he could not stand to hurt him any more, and then he would stop, until Crowley had healed from the burns. Sometimes it took only a day or two, sometimes weeks, and there was very little Aziraphale could do to ease it. Human medications for treating burns were insufficient, and his own magic would only make it worse.

He wished, rather desperately, that Crowley could understand what he was doing, the way he supposed humans must wish they could explain a veterinarian to a dog.

“I’m doing this to help you,” he would say, but he didn’t think that meant much when his help hurt so badly, and left such terrible wounds in its wake.

On some level, he thought perhaps Crowley at least understood that, overall, he was getting better, and that it was due to Aziraphale’s actions. It had been three months since they started this, and Crowley had stopped throwing himself at the barrier in an attempt to kill Aziraphale, and he had even stopped striking at him when he crossed into the cell.

Aziraphale hoped this was a sign of trust, rather than a sign of surrender.

A part of him held onto the thought that even if he could not have _his_ Crowley back, he could help _this_ Crowley heal from his ordeal. He could be friends with _this_ Crowley, too. It wouldn’t be the same, nothing would _ever_ be the same, but… he liked to think that if their positions had been reversed, if Gabriel had been a little less cruel and exacted his punishment upon the correct person, Crowley would try to help Aziraphale. That Crowley would be his friend, even if Aziraphale didn’t remember him from before.

A much smaller part of him hoped that if he fixed Crowley’s form enough, his mind would follow. Humans sometimes experienced that, and while Crowley was very, _very_ far from human, he’d come much closer to it than any of the other angels and demons, except for, perhaps, Aziraphale himself.

If he was very, very lucky, sifting through Crowley’s existence to heal him might reveal some small remnant of who he was, like sifting through the rubble of a building in search of survivors. Just as similarly, every day that passed with nothing to be found made it seem less likely that there was anything to be found.

Still, he sifted.

He healed what he could find, and tried to ignore Crowley struggling against the burning of his hands when before had leaned into their comfort. After, he would speak to Crowley in a low, soothing voice about the times that they had shared, or he would read from books Crowley had gotten him, or sang him songs he thought Crowley might have liked, once.

And sometimes he just sat outside the wards, his back against a wall, and he cried for the hand they had been dealt.

* * *

_Day pass, bleeding into weeks, and months. The angel comes, and touches him, hurts him, and grief pours off of it in waves. Crowley no long bites, and he tries not to struggle even when it hurts the worst, because he knows the angel, for whatever reason, is trying to help. There is healing in the pain, or in the days that follow. He can spread almost all of his wings, and his wounds no longer seep ichor. They are stiff with the iron of stardust._

_He watches the angel as it makes noises, until it gives up, and it leaves him, and then he is alone again._

_Sometimes he thinks that is worse._

_But he can remember the burning pits in Hell, now. He can remember the gnashing teeth and the sickle claws and the foulness steeped into every atom of the place._

_Even alone, this is better._

_After the angel is gone, and when he is sure it will not return for a while, Crowley slinks around his cage. There are things here. Things he does not think the angel put here. Most of them are toppled or destroyed or in pieces, but they are here._

_In the hall, a pile of stone. It had stood vertically, once, with the echo of wings spread above it. He stares at the pieces of it, and he tastes ash. He tastes blood and ash and the spark of something holy._

_Sequestered in the back, a room full of dying organic matter. He rustles through the brown, crackled remains that have fallen to the floor, and he feels fear and anger and sorrow emanating from them as though they had soaked all of it up for a long time, and then broken open upon their deaths._

_He coils himself up in the box of softness hidden in a room, under the layers that can be separated from it, and warmth echoes back at him like a memory. Warmth, and loneliness, and anxiety. He leaves that room quickly, and does not return._

_It is a strange cage. It smells of the angel in places the angel has never been. It smells of something else, something familiar, and he feels possessive of it, even though it is currently possessing him against his will._

_He slithers, around and around, searching for something he cannot name, until the angel returns._

_And then he sits, and he watches, and he tries to find the words for a wound in his core he cannot seem to heal._

* * *

Almost one year to the day after he brought Crowley’s broken, furious essence back to the flat, Aziraphale arrived to find a massive red and black serpent coiled around the remains of Crowley’s old work desk, and the throne which had once decorated the room. The snake’s eyes did not tick to him, remaining sliver-pupiled and fixed in place.

Crowley was sleeping, for the first time, and for one single, heart-stopping moment, Aziraphale thought it had worked. He thought that he had healed Crowley enough, and that he had finally remembered enough to take on an Earthly Aspect. That he had remembered enough of himself to nap, the way he had liked to do before.

And the serpent stirred, and a low hiss began to fill the air as the coils behind his neck became a sharp S-shape. Prepared to strike, with no recognition flickering in his golden eyes.

Aziraphale choked on the lump in his throat, his chest constricting around his heart, and he turned around, and he left the way he’d come without having said a single word.

He couldn’t do this.

He had thought he could do this, when the demon in his hands looked nothing like Crowley, and acted even less like his friend. When it was a wretched, injured thing in need of help. When it struck at him, and howled and threw itself against the barriers. Even when it sat still, watching him, waiting for him to make the wrong move, he believed he could handle it. He could handle meeting someone new.

But that had been _Crowley._

Not a demon, not a new, blank version he could befriend again. That had been the very same serpent that had spent so many evenings coiled up in his shop, or around his feet as he read, or even piled atop him when the weather chilled. That had been a monster, wearing the face of the being he loved, and he could not do this. He could not do this at all.

He went to the park, and to his shop, and he couldn’t stand them. He took a cab to the shore of the sea, where Crowley had shown him a cottage once, but it only made the ache worse. He sat in a booth in the corner of his favorite diner long after it had closed, and he fell apart into so many pieces he thought he’d never put himself back together the same, and then he went the last place he ever wanted to go again.

Beelzebub looked up from zir paperwork, and did not look at all surprised to see him.

“Tell me what to do,” he said, not proud of how much it sounded like begging.

He didn’t care.

There had to be something he had missed. These demons, _this_ demon before him now, had become a person again. This demon, this prince of Hell, had looked at him with something almost like pity in zir eyes, once, and zir had helped Aziraphale when Gabriel had only sneered. Perhaps ze would do so again.

Beelzebub shook zir head. “Let him go.”

“I can’t,” Aziraphale said. He could stay away forever, never see Crowley again until the whole of existence ended, but he could never let go like that. His love had become a part of him, a part of the way his energy flowed, a part of the way he existed. If he gave it up, he would be the same as Crowley; no longer himself. “Please… how did you… _get back?_ To yourself.”

Zir eyes dropped, and ze leaned back in zir chair, hands folding together in front of zir. “I didn’t,” ze said softly. “No one did.”

“Lucifer remembers,” Aziraphale said. Surely Lucifer remembered. How else would he have held on to such a grudge? How else could he have planned an entire war?

“Sorry, _angel,"_ Beelzebub said, a cruel mockery of the word Aziraphale had been so fond of hearing from his own demon’s lips. “That won’t work for you. Only two people outrank Gabriel, and Crowley’s not one of them. Your boyfriend didn’t mean anything to anyone.”

“He meant something to me,” Aziraphale told zir.

“A dizzzzgraced cherub-turned-principality doesn’t matter much, either,” Beelzebub said.

“We mattered enough to save the world,” Aziraphale said tightly. Maybe that was the worst of it; they had been able to stop everything else from ending. He should have been able to stop Crowley from ending, too.

“And look where that got you,” Beelzebub said, with a nasty little sneer. “I’ve told you what you have to do. Now get out of my offizzzz.”

Aziraphale opened his wings, and let his light shine through just until Beelzebub was forced to cower away from it a little, and then he was gone.

* * *

_Weeks pass, and the angel does not return._

_It had come back before, and found him while he was Afflicted, partially aware and fully inside of his serpent Aspect. It did not like to see him take a single form, or perhaps it did not like the form he had taken that day. It had seen him as a serpent, and it had fled._

_Somehow that hurts worse than anything the angel had done before._

_Crowley waits, and waits, and waits, but he is alone._

_He waits, and he looks at the things he has destroyed around him, and he thinks about the searing touch of the angel, and he wants something he does not have any concept of. He presses himself against the wards until he cannot stand the burning any longer, and then he tries another spot in another room, and another, and another, angry at being abandoned._

_In one room of his cage, there is a cylinder made of metal, wrapped in stripes of color, and it fills him up with the fear that he will never see the angel again, and he cannot understand why._

_In another, there is a sphere and it glows in the dead of night, blue and green and brown and white, and it makes him want to stay, and go, and it fills him with dread if he stares at it for too long. It makes him feel hunted, and he wants to escape and there is no escape, and he is **alone.**_

_In his panic, he presses against the barrier again, and he wishes for the angel to return, and he falls onto the other side of the magic, whole._

_He is on the same side as the angel, now, and something about that feels right._

_But his angel is not here, and that’s wrong. He knows it is wrong even if he cannot explain why, and so he slithers through the atoms of the simple mortal doorway, and down the stairs, and into the stone garden outside of his cage._

_He must find his angel. He will._

_His long, purple tongue flicks out, gathering particles from the air until it catches the only ones familiar to him, and then he points his snout to the east, and follows their trail._

* * *

Aziraphale sat at his desk, staring at the ledger laid open upon it. He’d sold two books that day. He hadn’t wanted to, but it was getting harder to find a reason why he shouldn’t, if it was so easy to lose the things he loved. If Heaven could turn out to be full of rot, and Hell had been stripped of love by a wolf in sheep’s skin, and if his love for a creature could just be scooped out of it like a spot of ice cream, then he didn’t see a reason to bother with it in the first place.

What was the worth of love, if it couldn’t irreversibly change a thing?

What use was _our own side_ if they could be removed from it on a whim?

What use was _any_ of it, if what they built could be so easily lost?

Some part of him understood that, for humans, love could not be a cornerstone of who they were, not when their emotions were so fragile and shifting. But angels were beings _made_ of love, made for it right down to their cores. What did that mean, if it could be removed so easily? What was he, if love could be removed without destroying him?

A demon, he thought. One in the making, anyway.

He stared at the ledger, at the clear liquid smudging the ink.

If love could be taken away from him, wouldn’t it be better to give it away first? He could sell his books. He could sell the shop, and give up the foods, and the drinks, and the shows.

If he leaped, they couldn’t make him fall.

If there was nothing left of him after he’d given away everything he loved, then maybe it wouldn’t hurt so bad. Maybe he could forget the ache in his chest. Or at least maybe he wouldn’t be so acutely aware of what had caused it. Maybe he could forget the thing he missed the most.

He wiped at the tears on the page, and the ink smeared beyond legibility. He closed the ledger, not caring if the wet ink stained the page adjacent. It didn’t matter. Records wouldn’t matter when the total hit zero anyway. When there was nothing left, what had come before wouldn’t matter.

The shop door jingled.

Aziraphale closed his eyes and counted to three before he pushed himself away from the desk and called out: “Coming!”

He poked his nose around a shelf to see who had come in, but there were no humans standing in the entryway, nor any at the nearby shelves. Usually they drifted in, fingers trailing over dusty spines and covers. Most of the humans that visited the shop weren’t actually interested in buying things; they were only interested in enjoying the sight of old books, the scent of history, the _aesthetic_ as Crowley would say.

Would have said, he reminded himself.

“Hello?” he called, hoping to echo locate the customer when they answered _hello!_

He felt a cold presence slide across his own, and the hairs of his mortal body prickled up and his ethereal eyes all opened, searching. Perhaps they had come for him next. They’d get a surprise if they had; even in his despair, he had more than enough wrath to teach at least one demon how to regret.

The presence moved, going deeper into the bookshop, and then it fell still right where Aziraphale spent most of his time. He gave a slow flick of his wrist, calling forth a sword from the ether, and gripped it with both hands. It might not have been flaming, but it would still cleave a demon from its host and send it back to Hell.

He rounded the last corner quickly, sword poised and a blessing that died on his tongue when he saw the perfectly massive coil of black and red serpent on his lounge. The sword clattered to the floor from nerveless fingers.

Crowley had escaped, and come here, of all places.

He had come _here._

The serpent shifted, golden eyes ticking to Aziraphale, and he could feel something other than rage and fear and pain radiating from Crowley, now. Confusion and anxiety and… and _hope,_ of all things.

“…..Aziraphale?”

Aziraphale choked on a sob of relief, and even as he stepped forward, Crowley was uncoiling to come to him, to wrap around him, not in an attack but in comfort. “You remember?” Aziraphale asked, hands upon the chill scales slowly encircling him.

“No,” Crowley said, somewhere in the ocean between sarcasm and worry as he nudged his face against Aziraphale’s chest. “Yes. Not everything. But I remember you. I remember you, angel.”

* * *

_He lies still, coils looped over Aziraphale back and forth and around, and soaks in the angelic warmth pouring forth. His angel. His Aziraphale._

_The bookshop smells like home. It feels like all of the love stored in the pages of every book. There is tea in the cupboards and music on the player and Aziraphale’s heartbeat under his scutes. He is safe._

_With every contented stroke of Aziraphale’s hand, Crowley’s core loosens its iron grip and spills more of the memories he had hidden away in his last, panicked moment before Gabriel severed his connection to the Host and, by proxy, to Her love. At the time of the First Fall, that would have been the end of an angel, void of all the Love that had created it._

_But Crowley has spent the last six millennia learning new kinds of love. He remembers thinking, as Her love was torn from him, that he had been without Her love for so long already — all of them had — that it wouldn’t matter anymore if Gabriel took it. His heart no longer lived in his own chest, and when Gabriel had come for him, Her love was not his only love. He had Aziraphale now, and the love they shared had burned bright in the very core of him, and that was enough. He had closed himself up around it — and around all of the memories which had caused it — protecting it as everything else had been shorn away._

_Protecting it even from himself, unsure of what he would become after._

_Nothing good, he surmises, but even now those memories are fading. He thinks there was a cage, but all he can remember is his flat and the tang of Aziraphale’s protective magic. He thinks there was pain, but all he can remember is the healing touch of Aziraphale’s hands. He remembers the stories Aziraphale read to him, and the photos he showed to him, and the songs he sang. He remembers Aziraphale sitting on the floor beside him, the thinnest of magical barriers between them, crying for him._

_“I love you,” he says again, for every time he could not do so._

_Aziraphale’s love radiates out from him like sunshine on a fine spring day, thawing the chill of Crowley’s core. It leaves him with the sense-memory of fine wine on his tongue and laughter in his belly. It toes the door open a little further. Crowley does not remember everything, not yet, but it is there, safe and sound._

_Just like him._

* * *

“Did you know that it would happen?” Aziraphale asked one evening, a few weeks down the road, when he was fairly certain Crowley would actually answer him. He had been getting more open to talking about what had happened, but it was slow going, and Aziraphale was careful.

Crowley’s blade slowed from where he had been chopping carrot slices, and he stared down at his hands. “What?”

“Did you know that it would happen,” Aziraphale repeated, because it had been bothering him for so long. “That you hadn’t Fallen like the others? You told me once that you hadn’t really fallen. You’d-”

“-sauntered vaguely downward,” they finished together.

“Right,” Aziraphale said. “So, did you know?”

Crowley set down the paring knife. “I knew,” he said carefully, as if he knew what sort of minefield his words would tread upon. “I… I thought I had taken care of it. I didn’t think it… would _catch up_ like that. At least… I thought I would get more warning.”

“What do you mean you _took care_ of it?”

Aziraphale wanted to sound curious, not accusatory, but Crowley could have at least _mentioned_ it would be a possibility. If for no personal reason, then because they could have been looking for some way to fix it for others. If Her will had only been that the disobedient angels _leave,_ then Gabriel had crossed a lot of lines. He had done unspeakable wrongs to all of Hell, for starters, not to mention the ripple effect it must have had upon the humans.

For a few seconds, Aziraphale thought that Crowley wouldn’t answer. He just stood there, posture so stiff and tense, and then it all leached out of him and he turned around to face Aziraphale. He crossed his arms over his front defensively, and then uncrossed them and put his palms on the edge of the counter, leaning back against it. Though he wasn’t wearing his glasses in the kitchen, Aziraphale could practically feel their presence anyway.

“I worked in filing,” Crowley said slowly. “I catalogued elemental usage, mostly in starmaking. Most of my crew got wrapped up in Lucifer’s- his _rhetoric_ early on. The archangels split them up, and me too, and I got assigned to…”

His eyes, already focused on the floor, closed.

“Please, love,” Aziraphale said softly. “What happened?”

“Gabriel was planning… _what he did,_ before Lucifer ever got cast out,” Crowley admitted. “Not _long_ before, maybe he knew it was coming even, but he was. And some kind of mixup put _my own_ paperwork on my desk to be processed, so I knew… I tossed it. Burned it, rather. I figured, if someone already filled mine out, and it just didn’t get filed…”

“Then it wouldn’t happen,” Aziraphale concluded. “And it didn’t.”

“I thought it had worked,” Crowley said, dragging his gaze up and looking at Aziraphale as if he were asking for something. “I never thought-”

“It’s not your fault,” Aziraphale said. “I wish you had told me, but you had every reason not to give yourself away.”

Crowley was quiet for another tense moment, and then he shrugged a little blandly, clearly ready to move on. “I guess you can only defer the inevitable for so long.”

Aziraphale watched him turn back around to the carrots, and then he got up from where he’d been seated at the island with a glass of wine. Crowley had to have heard him approach, but he didn’t turn, and didn’t stop his methodical chopping until Aziraphale wrapped his arms around him from behind. He rested his cheek upon the blade of Crowley’s shoulder and closed his eyes.

“I love you,” he murmured, letting it bubble up straight from his heart. “I love you, I love you, _I love you,_ Crowley. We have three times now avoided The Inevitable becoming permanent. That’s not nothing.”

The knife fell still and a moment later Crowley’s chilly hands came to rest atop Aziraphale’s arms, holding him gently in place. “I know. Thank you… for coming to get me. For healing me, and bringing me back.”

“I will always,” Aziraphale vowed, even though he refused to let there be a _next time._ If Heaven or Hell wanted to tangle with them again, they were going to find out what exactly a berserk angel was capable of. “Thank you for coming back.”

“Always,” Crowley echoed. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Aziraphale smiled. “That seems a bit boring, never going anywhere.”

“Oh, shove off, you know what I meant,” Crowley said with a laugh.

Aziraphale warmed at the sound; the return of Crowley’s laugh made him indescribably happy. “I do,” he agreed. “Let’s not go anywhere, together.”

“I will go with you to all the nowheres you could ever want,” Crowley said gently, his smile spilling into his tone. “Just say the word.”

Aziraphale smiled against Crowley’s back. He believed him. They could spend the rest of their lives right here in Crowley’s kitchen, or down in the bookshop, or wherever else Aziraphale wanted to go in the entire universe. But he also knew that they couldn’t do that, not when things had gone so wrong here. Not when they might be the only two that could possibly stand a chance of fixing any of it and righting the world.

But… that was a problem for a different night. Tonight, and tomorrow, and likely for a good while after that, Aziraphale wanted nothing more than to wallow in the delight of having Crowley returned to him, complete if not whole. For now, that was all he needed. The rest could wait, at least for a while.

“Dinner first,” he said, pressing his nose briefly to where Crowley’s left wing would form, before releasing him.

Crowley smiled at him over his shoulder. “Dinner first,” he agreed, warm and happy and, most importantly, safe again under Aziraphale’s watch.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed it! I would love to hear from you in the comments <3


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